Fair’s fair: for once, Google did right, even though it took them ages.
My last entry on this topic was in April, when Google refused to remove a pirate site that they provide cloud services for.
Two months later, I received word that they had reviewed one of the URLs I had complained about: ‘We’re working on removing access to the content at these URLs per the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The content will be removed soon.’
I had planned to file with them to get the sites removed from the index itself, so it’s good that someone within the firm had the sense to action that independently.
It’s a drop in the ocean considering how much spun and pirated content is out there as a direct consequence of Google’s actions, but I’ll take the little triumphs I can get to make the web a better place. It’s also in Google’s best interests to have a workable search engine by removing pirate sites, but that won’t ultimately stop till those sites cease receiving funding from Google advertising.
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Baby steps, right? I’m going through a different site with the same company; trying to get them handling the analytics of all of my sites. Because they decided to change things up again, not all of my sites are working properly in this subject, which is irksome. But it is what it is sometimes… sigh…
They really are a terrible company, Mitch! Here was one experience I had in 2009 that was so bad Techdirt did a story on it—and I don’t think they’ve improved much!
That was an interesting read, and reminded me of when Google wiped out my ranking (remember those days?) and pretty much removed me from search because I’d signed up with a company to be paid for advertising some of their clients, and Google determined they weren’t legitimate; those weasels! lol Still, when all is said and done, Google’s still a better resource that DuckDuckGo or others; I know because I tried leaving Google for a few months to see what other sites would give me. The only benefit was that every blog post I wrote showed up on their search engines, but otherwise I wasn’t getting the information I was searching for (hmmm, that just took me back to Return of the Jedi lol)
I remember those days and I think Google still does it (or a version of it) where sites are downranked.
Duck Duck Go is Bing, and Bing pretty much collapsed during 2022 (though it has recovered somewhat). I tend to use Mojeek as a first resort, though sometimes I will wind up on Google if nothing else works. I did a few posts here tracking Google’s capabilities, and it seems they can’t handle PHP pages as well as plain HTML ones, so there is something very wrong with their search engine at the moment.
Bing has been better at grabbing new stuff, as has Yandex in Russia—I put my other half’s website online in May and Google still doesn’t have it, while the other two do. What is interesting with Bing is: how long does each blog post show up for? Because I’ve also found it to be very forgetful as a search engine and newer pages often vanished!